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5 Surprisingly Simple Ways To Make Time For Your Passions

How often do you hear someone say they don’t have time to do something? Or they’ll get around to doing something they really want to someday?

The things we love to do or our passions are what makes us unique. However the sad truth is, so few of us are intentional about pursuing our passions because of our perceived lack of time.

You may wondering why it’s important to actually make time for our passions.

Our passions are what brings us the most joy in life and when we’re actively living our passions, we feel alive, joyful and perform at our best. It’s when we experience the most out of life.

On the contrary, when we are not living our passions, we feel disengaged, unmotivated and feel like we’re drifting through life.

Therefore, making time to do the things that bring us joy is really important. Here are five simple ways to make time for your passions so that you can experience higher levels of joy on a regular basis.

Conduct an assessment of how you currently spend your time. Let’s suppose you work for eight hours per day, five days per week, and your daily travel time is a couple of hours. Add eight hours of sleep and that accounts for 18 out of the 24 available hours.

With the remaining six hours per weekday and your weekend, how do you spend that time? How much of that time is dedicated to doing the things you are passionate about?

Unless we know how we are currently spending our time, it will be very difficult to know where or how we can make time for our passions.

One action is to record how you spend your time every day for at least two weeks. Record it in a notebook or any online tool to get a better idea of what you are doing with your time.

Say no to things you are not passionate about more often. There are things we have to do that are not our passions. For me, it’s grocery shopping, which something I hate doing. However, it is something I choose to do at present so that I have food to eat daily.

However, there are demands on our time that are totally unnecessary. It may be being invited to events we don’t really want to attend but feel we have to. This is where becoming better at saying no is extremely important especially if we want to have the time to do the things we love.

Find someone who has similar passions. Having someone or a group of people who share a similar passion can be extremely beneficial as we’re able to be accountable to each other. Each person can take turns organising something around our passions and suddenly, we’re actively engaged in our passions. Having buddies not only makes any activity more enjoyable, it brings with it a level of commitment to others with respect to our passions.

Take advantage of any downtime in your day. For example, if one of your passions is reading, you may choose to read while commuting, if it’s safe to do so. You can also read if you’re standing in line at a checkout or if you’re waiting for an appointment. The key is to be aware that our passions doesn’t always require a great deal of time. We can fit them in daily if we’re intentional about it.

Schedule time for your passions in your calendar. If we want to absolutely guarantee to have time for our passions, it must be in our calendars. As the saying goes, “If it’s not in your calendar, it probably won’t get done.”

We can start off small — an hour per weekday and maybe two to three hours during weekends. That’s equivalent to seven or eight hours every week, which added up over a course of a year, equates to over 350 hours. That is a lot of time to dedicate to any of our passions.

If we want to feel our best, we must do the things we’re passionate about consistently. If we don’t make time for our passions, we will not operate at our best nor make the most out of life. Make the choice to follow your passions.

Action Step: Start off by conducting an assessment of how you currently spend your time, which will give you an idea of where you can find time to dedicate to your passions.